fire13, I don't need another team either - but I am in ! flbarons we are honored to have you and fire13 in with the rest of us. We are up to 22 and need just two more. Hurray !

In any case, I think one's relationship to a team that you build from scratch in a founding league draft is also different - not a one-time thing like in OLs, not even a rebuilding from a roster that is already there as when you join later to take over a team needing an owner, but really your own vision with immediate and long-term planning. So in a way EVERYONE needs that !

As to the era, it is a great way to learn players and teams when you play a prog in a period you don't know that well, and then we will gradually work our way through the 50s to the 60s. Knowing that somewhere out there are Mantle, Mays, Aaron, Koufax, Gibson and the rest is part of the fun.

Basically I wanted to create a situation where there are essentially two number 1 picks - one for the players who played in the AL in the year we are drafting (currently 1946) or later in their rookie years and one for those who played (again speaking of real life baseball now) in the NL.

A very few - I think two players - played in both leagues in 1946, so I put them on the list for whichever league they had more PA in.

If you look at the lists of available players for drafting I have divided them into:

National League position players and pitchers

American League position players and pitchers

Secondary players and pitchers (from those oddball leagues and seasons).

We will basically have three separate drafts - first the NL, and once every players has been drafted, or at least no one wants to draft any other NL player, we will then draft the AL players into our teams. When we all have at least 16 players on our rosters AND no one wants any of the remaining players or there are no more left, we turn to that long list of Secondary players so everyone can draft whomever they need to fill their remaining positions, rosters, staffs etc.

Everyone can draft up to 35 players - with 10 that will remain then in AAA once the season starts whom you can bring up whenever they are needed. But no one is required to draft more than 25 if they don't need to or want to.

The NL draft will happen first and the draft order will be determined by using the website that generates a random list for these purposes. So for now we can all concentrate our research on those players who are on the NL list that I posted - I will repost all the lists together once we are full so they are all easier to find, but they are all up there in the classified thread already. Whoever goes last in round 1 will go first in round 2, whoever was next to last will go second and so on. Then in round 3 we are back to the original order from round 1 and it will continue will odd number rounds going A to X (24 owners and so 24 letters of the alphabet), and even numbered ones going X to A.

Then I will generate a new random order for the AL. The only difference will be that if any of the same owners that were numbers 1-4 for the draft of players from the real life NL are also in the top 4 for this draft I will move those to somewhere between numbers 20-24, depending on what pick the people at the bottom previously had for the sake of spreading the good draft positions more widely, bumping everyone ahead of that or those people whom I move up one or more slots based on how many needed to be shifted. Again, we will then go A to X in round 1, X to A in round 2. etc.

The first round of the draft of players from the NL list will be off the clock, meaning people have as long as it needs to get their research done and make their picks. We will start going on the clock, in probably half hour shifts, starting in round 2 whenever that is.

We can then see how everyone feels later about whether to stay on the clock even for round 1 of the draft of players on the AL list which we start only after the draft of NL players is finished.

Once all that is done, the order of the draft for Secondary players will in theory be based on the number of free roster positions each owner had and therefore how many picks they theoretically need (even if they are not going to use them, we will always use 35 minus number already on roster to determine the order). However, in future seasons this will work better as people will have cut or drafted different numbers - it is quite possible that most of us will have the same number of players this first time around after the NL/AL player drafts, so my guess is that I will do one more random ordering for that draft as well this time, though in the future that won't be needed.

At any point in all this, any owner may use their pick in any round to choose a stadium and therefore city, state or region for their team to play in as their pick for that round.

I hope this helps.

The initial draft will take time and we all need a little patience with each other as we go through it, we all need time to research players and figure out our priorities - pitching, position players, offense, good players for now, players who develop later etc. and we will all have different approaches to these problems.

It is made a little easier by the fact that we draft one list (players who played in the NL in 1946), then only after that whole draft a second list (those played in the AL in 1946) and only then the list of Secondary players, so we can all do our research in stages if needed.

We are probably going to hold the draft in an unused forum for an old progressive league that chargingryno has kept open (the forum that is) where we can organize ourselves for this more efficiently - we used it for another founding draft for another league about a year ago and it worked very well.

I will ask chargingryno to provide all of us on the list access to that forum as soon as we are full - and Thank You chargingryno for the generous offer - and we will all meet up there where I will once again post - all in one place to make life easier the relevant lists of players available for the draft.

Since we are likely to fill up in the next 24 hours (or minutes the way this is going), we can in theory start whenever I have generated the random draft orders and chargingryno has provided us all access to the forum, at which point I will send a sitemail to everyone informing us all of that. The first person up can in principle make their first draft pick at any time, but since we are off the clock we can all take all the time we need to fully research players and be prepared before making picks. We will not go on the clock till round 2 and even if we run ahead of the clock as we draft the very earliest we would go on the clock would be Monday, later than that if we are still in round 1.

I hope this clarifies things.

THANKS EVERYONE FOR JOINING AND SHOWING INTEREST, ENTHUSIASM AND SOME CONFIDENCE IN THIS IDEA.

I look forward to getting the ball rolling (and then fielded and thrown to first for the out):

chargingryno, can you give everyone on the owner list for the league access to the forum please, so we can move the draft materials there ? Thanks.

I will sitemail everyone when we have the forum up and accessible to us all and I have the randomly generated draft order for the drafts of NL and AL players. I will post the lists of available players for the draft (NL, AL and Secondary player lists) and available ballparks here again in a little while (I am finishing grading my Spring semester courses today), so that they are easier to locate but they are all here in this thread if you go back a couple of pages, and then will also post them in the forum chargingryno will let us use until we have our own league number and can set up a permanent league forum.

Again, see the explanation of what we will do now in the post just above this one, and welcome and thanks everyone !

Here is the list of secondary players that will be available to fill rosters and allow us to being the league with 24 teams and therefore with 6 divisions, two wildcards and so 8 playoff teams right from the start in 1946.

These players are drawn from four sources: The American Association teams of the 19th century; the Players League which lasted only two seasons; the Federal League of 1914-15; and those players who played ONLY during the World War II seasons 1943-45. To be eligible for this last group, players must not have played MLB at any time (at least must not have a presence in the WIS database) before 1942 or after 1945, and only their 1943-5 seasons will used here. +

The parameters I used to find these players were the following:

For position players, for the American Association and Federal League, players had to have a minimum of 200 PA and a maximum of 400 PA and a batting average of .299 or lower. No .300 hitters among secondary players. For the Players League, the maximum was raised to 550 PA but the other parameters were the same as for the AA and the FL. For the World War II players, I used a minimum of 200 PA and a maximum of 500 PA, and the same max of .299 batting average. I relaxed these criteria and made exceptions only for two or three Shortstops here and there to insure enough of this key position to go around. There seem to be an unusually large number of catchers. Remember that many of these players have secondary positions as well, which can sometimes make them valuable to a team in our league.

For pitchers, for all leagues and time periods I used the same criteria: a minimum of 50 and maximum of 200 IP and a minimum WHIP of 1.35. No cookies.

The basic standard I kept in mind was this – Would this player or type of player alter significantly the competitive balance in the league or be likely to decide a divisional race ?

These players are intended to be used as bench players, platoons where you have a half time starting regular, as pinch- hitters, as starting players where there are not enough players in our league season with full time PA, as fourth or fifth, or where we are desperate third and fourth starting pitchers, long and middle relievers, and in at least a few cases, though less often as defensive subs. Some of them are good enough to be starting players and you may use them as you like, many are just awful. You may trade them, but no team may keep them beyond the currently played season. They ALL return to the secondary draft pool after each season to re-drafted anew. We will use them until baseball itself expanded in real life so that we can already begin to reduce the use of them perhaps as early as 1962, reduce them significantly in 1969 and by the following expansions eliminate their use altogether.

These players will be available for all of our secondary drafts, following our ordinary, annual draft of new players and free agents from the American and National Leagues. These players will NOT advance in time, only these player seasons will be available to help fill rosters and positions needed. Only the specific season listed – identified by the number of PA/162 or IP/162 - may be used for the player involved.

Players with more than one available season may be drafted only in one player-season iteration in any given draft – thus if Scott Stratton 1889 has been drafted already, Scott Stratton 1888 MAY NOT also be drafted for that same league season, but may be drafted in any other season if another Stratton year has not been previously drafted, in which case the other Stratton seasons are unavailable to also draft for that same season of play. Likewise if the OF version of Famer Vaughn has been drafted already, the Catcher versions of Farmer Vaughn are no longer available for drafting for that season, and vice versa.

Players who played with more than one team in the same season (the definition of a “partial” season) likewise may only be drafted once in any given draft as well –once drafted by one owner and team, that player is no longer available for that season of our league play.

YOU MAY USE ONLY THE PLAYER SEASON WITH THE PA/162 LISTED HERE FOR THAT PLAYER, AND NOT ANY OTHER OF THE SAME SEASON OR ANY OTHER SEASON.

No clones will exist in our league. There will be only one version of any player in the league at any one time in any of our seasons, though which version it is may vary from season to season.

THE PLAYERS LISTED HERE MAY BE NOT REMAIN ON THE TEAMS DRAFTING THEM AS KEEPERS, BUT RETURN TO THE POOL OF AVAILABLE SECONDARY PLAYERS BEFORE EVERY NEW DRAFT. ONLY THE AMERICAN LEAGUE AND NATIONAL LEAGUE MLB PLAYERS FROM THE SEASON WE ARE PLAYING CURRENTLY MAY BE LISTED AS KEEPERS FOR SUCCESSIVE SEASONS.

NO COMPUTER GENERATED AAA MAY BE USED OR TRADED, THOUGH THESE SECONDARY PLAYERS MAY BE TRADED, PROVIDED IT IS REMEMBERED THAT NEITHER TEAM CAN HOLD THEM AS KEEPERS FOR SUCCESSIVE SEASONS.

AL and NL available players – why we need another available pool:

Available Position players

Our League begins in the 1946 season. The available players from MLB for 1946 number:

Available Ballparks and cities, and team name rules for 1946 Progressive League teams

Any stadium not listed may be used as an alternative site if in existence BEFORE 1946. Other stadiums will become available in the years that they came into use historically. Likewise, teams may move to cities that are not currently listed in the seasons when those cities originally had major league baseball teams after MLB expanded (e.g. Seattle, Denver, Arizona, San Diego, Toronto etc.)

Teams may move from a current city and stadium to any of those listed below that are not currently in use at the time.

Team names must begin with the city, state or region (such as “New England”, “Southern California”, “Great Lakes”, “Ohio Valley” etc.) but owners may then choose any team name they wish so long as they avoid profanity or explicitly vulgar names. But otherwise anything goes – baseball culture is nothing if not kitsch !